• Accessibility
• Email alerts
• RSS feeds
• Contact us

A brave new Britain? The future of the UK’s international policy Contents

---

1The challenge

1.“Frankly, I’m embarrassed that our generation has done this,” Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told us. “It is very difficult to sit with your young children and say to them, ‘Good luck to you. We will soon be passing on, in 20 or 30 years, and you will have to deal with this unbelievable state we are in.’”1 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel Peace Laureate and former President of Liberia, saw “tragedies all over the world”:2 a world that is “becoming a more dangerous place” (said Lord Hague of Richmond, former UK Foreign Secretary),3 “entering a very difficult time” (said Koji Tsuruoka, Japan’s former Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs),4 and will be a “world of instability, insecurity, and polarization” (said the International Committee of the Red Cross).5 Their views were part of the 80 written submissions and more than 100 pages of oral evidence gathered from around the world and published by our inquiry.6

2.The Integrated Review is a timely and necessary response to a world characterised by ever-strengthening interconnection and rapid technological change. Digital innovation and cheap travel have enabled people to visit, trade, support, enhance and understand one another more than ever. Nations, economies, markets and product chains are more intimately interconnected than ever before.7 With interconnectedness comes interdependence, for good and ill. Local challenges can quickly become international crises. These challenges can leave nations and individuals vulnerable to deliberate sabotage in ways that stop short of physical confrontation. Revolutionary factors, such as the expanding world of cyber, our lives online, and the development of algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, or machine-learning capacities have multiplied the power of a few individuals and companies that have innovated in this space. Those governments who wish not to intervene, for fear of constraining that innovation, risk becoming absent players in these frontier spaces. Those governments that seek to assert themselves over their own citizens or other nations now have, through such technologies, a much enhanced and potentially disruptive capacity to do so.

3.The prevailing sense of pessimism that characterised the contributions to our inquiry came in part from the immediate circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic. We do not yet know whether this will be a temporary or a more enduring phenomenon, but it has had a dramatic effect on global interconnection and halted global progress in many forms.8 In addition, climate change poses an existential threat to the way we live our lives. International bodies have thus far found it difficult to find solutions to these problems, but these profound challenges have laid bare an even more deep-seated problem:9 the world is increasingly riven by global competition rather than cooperation.

4.In part, this global competition is driven by geo–political change. Other regions of the world are rising to greater economic strength and international influence alongside that of ‘the West’.10 But this global competition is also a battle between competing visions and mindsets. Autocracies are increasingly challenging the rules and norms that have, for decades, regulated international exchange. As competition intensifies, it will fall on democratic nations to uphold the central tenets of the rules-based international system, including democracy, human rights, and free trade. Many of our contributors urged the UK to articulate a clear place for universal values at the heart of its international policy,11 more effectively to challenge ‘revisionist’ powers that seek to subvert the international system and weaken rights.12 And the global competition is increasingly one between different technical systems. There is a trend towards ‘our’ systems code versus ‘theirs’, with declining interoperability.13 As countries are pressured to ‘pick a side’, the early decisions they take could soon become increasingly difficult to change and the sunk cost of new technology draws them down a path that encodes the values of one system into the heart of the economy.

5.Such competition has stalled, and to some degree reversed, cooperation through multilateral organisations. The drive towards international arbitration is increasingly challenged by great power rivalry and influence projection. The world lacks consensus-building leadership. Global divides are widening, and there is a risk of the world’s challenges becoming more abundant, more severe, and more difficult to resolve. There has been a tendency in the past to leave such leadership to more powerful nations. But the United States and China have recently failed to play a global leadership role and have, in pursuit of their own self-interest, deliberately undermined efforts to reach multilateral agreements.14 That has left other states, those more dependent on structured cooperation than direct expressions of national will, needing to work together to reinforce the framework of global cooperation.

6.An increasingly assertive and revisionist China has created geo-political friction with a more introspective United States. China and Russia, as leading authoritarian and revisionist powers, have also been more adept than their ideological rivals at realising where their capacity for international influence lies and harnessing the full spectrum of such capabilities. This includes hybrid warfare and the spread of propaganda and disinformation abroad, aggressive industrial policies including hostile take-overs, money laundering, debt as a tool to force smaller states into compliance, and incremental gains in territory through challenging the administration and sovereignty of smaller nations.15 Although this strategy has brought short-term benefits for these countries, we believe it is ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable.

7.The UK’s own international policy has been adrift. It has lacked clarity. More than four years after the soundbite was first used to encapsulate the UK’s international role, and almost three years after our Committee first called for more clarity about its meaning and metrics, many of our contributors still told us that they did not know what Global Britain stood for.16

8.It has also lacked confidence. Our contributors the world over were clear that the UK has recently appeared less ambitious and more absent in its global role. They gave a variety of reasons, including a diminished profile during the UK’s membership of the European Union,17 distraction by the process of leaving the EU,18 previous under-resourcing of its diplomatic service,19 or a more general de–prioritisation of some regions plus a reluctance against assertion in others.20 But, whatever the explanation, the conclusion was strikingly unanimous:

• From the Pacific region of East Asia, Ambassador-at-Large Professor Chan Heng Chee, from the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said: “If I may be frank, I think Britain could step up its profile in the region.”21
• From India, the country’s former Ambassador to the UN, Asoke Mukerji, told us that “in the political and strategic sphere, there is a perception that the UK is not involved as much as it should be.”22
• Of South America,23 former-President Juan Manuel Santos said: “Unfortunately, it has been neglected” by the UK, and that “the presence of the UK in Latin America has been extremely small. It should have been larger, and it can be larger.”24
• From the Middle East, His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan suggested that the UK had been more inward looking due to the challenges of Covid-19 and Brexit.25
• From Africa,26 former-President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf suggested that the UK had “changed the intensity of its effort” and that “there was a change—perhaps a noticeable change—that in a way [the UK] had passed responsibility to others.”27
• From Australia, the country’s former Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, said: “I think that over the past 30 years the UK has retreated and become a regional country. […] there was a period of 17 years, including the nearly 12 years I was Foreign Minister, when no single British Foreign Secretary visited Australia. When I think back on that, it seems quite incredible.”28
• Lord Hague of Richmond, the former UK Foreign Secretary, said that “the UK has to be prepared to launch initiatives and perhaps be a little bit more French in our approach—I never thought I would say that. They do not really hold back on coming up with a new initiative and presenting it to the rest of the world.”29 The former French Ambassador to the UK, Sylvie Agnès Bermann, agreed that “it is true that [ the UK does] not take so many initiatives […] I think that the UK studies everything, every consequence. If you do not take risks, you do not play a role.”30

9.None of our contributors wanted the UK to stand back or keep quiet. All of them urged the UK to step up, do more, and play a more impactful role in the world. They highlighted the positive contribution that the UK could make to international relations, and the negative implications if it declined. Bobby McDonagh, a former Ambassador from the Republic of Ireland to the UK, said that “British foreign policy should seek to regain fully its self-confidence.”31 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf warned that “we need the United Kingdom and the skills it has, based on its influence and historical relationship, to do more […] the United Kingdom cannot retreat at this moment in time. It cannot retreat from the world.”32 Samantha Power, a former US Ambassador to the UN, agreed:

In a world where burden-sharing is indispensable, where the United States will not be the world’s policeman, it is important that there is a powerful, values-driven democracy that is willing to pull its weight—really to punch above its weight—in the international system. […] British diplomats and development professionals are involved in promoting all of those things in really singular ways.33

10.The UK has good reason to be confident in the capabilities of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), which were praised by contributors from around the world. In a survey of British Council youth networks in a range of different countries, commissioned by our Committee in collaboration with others,34 respondents overwhelmingly agreed that “the UK is an influential country in the world” and were clear that they saw the UK as having “the most influence in global affairs” through its diplomacy followed by its international aid. Samantha Power told us that “the diplomatic power of British public servants—foreign service—out in the field working alongside and in partnership with their development counterparts is a striking feature of the UK’s comparative advantage of its value add globally.”35 Sylvie-Agnès Bermann described the UK’s diplomatic service as “this wonderful tool”,36 while the City of London Corporation wrote of how “‘the British Embassy’ brands are powerful and widely respected.”37

11.Our evidence noted the UK’s convening power.38 The UK has a strong capacity to use its memberships and influence to bring countries together in dialogue. Contributors also admired the UK as a pragmatic country whose thought leadership, and the legal drafting capabilities of the FCDO’s lawyers, can bring the world together through agreed, stable and predictable frameworks. The UK’s own adherence to such frameworks is of paramount importance to its international reputation. It was an observation made, among others,39 by Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein,40 Ambassador Chan Heng Chee from Singapore,41 and Koji Tsuruoka from Japan who when, asked what the UK was good at, said:

In one word, I would say “quality”. Quality has many aspects. The legal capacity of the UK’s diplomats, lawyers and even political leadership is first class, if not top of the world. Many of the UN resolutions have been drafted by the UK’s diplomats in New York and London. Many of the important international treaties, including the framework of Bretton Woods, have been produced by the UK. This is because the UK has had, and I think continues to have, a long-term view of the global vision, and the ability to put that in writing and bring people on board, especially the Americans. This is a very high quality that we, meaning the world, need. No one else can do the same. This is something available only to the UK, and this will be the same for quite some time.42

12.But the UK will have the greatest impact abroad if it uses its range of assets and capabilities coherently. It is unlikely that the merger of the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) will resolve the persistent problem that Britain abroad is less than the sum of its parts. The merger was announced on 16 June 2020,43 completed in September, and assessed by our Committee in a dedicated report.44 It was justified, in part, as giving coherence and adding impact to UK policy. The Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, said that the merger would “strengthen our position in an intensely competitive world.”45 But the problem of incoherence extended beyond DFID. BOND, a network of more than 400 organisations working in international development and humanitarian aid, was one of our contributors to write that “the Government is not doing enough to ensure policy coherence in decision-making.”46 The Foreign Policy Centre referred to “significant cultural roadblocks to achieving a whole-government approach to the UK’s international strategy”47 while, even after the FCO-DFID merger, the Institute for Government warned that “more work needs to be done” to “decide what organisational changes are necessary at the heart of government to maximise the UK’s influence across the world.”48 Dr Robin Porter, a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bristol, assessed that:

Other government departments in recent years have developed and pursued their own agendas for activity overseas, including the Ministry of Defence, DFID, Defra, and the various manifestations of the business arm of government—the DTI, UKTI, now BEIS etc. On occasion these [other government department] initiatives have been in conflict with those of the FCO, or have been carried out without the degree of sensitivity that successful diplomacy requires

and concluded that:

while other government departments may be involved in implementing that strategy, the formation of foreign policy advice to government should come from the FCO.49

13.The Integrated Review must address a lack of clear strategic vision, a lack of confidence, and lack of coherent implementation that has undermined recent international policy by the UK. The Review should respond, and be seen to respond, to the consultation that it has undertaken and the challenge that a robust review requires. It should publish its evidence base transparently, showing that future policy has a broad and strong foundation. And, for Global Britain to be more than just a slogan, the Review must provide:

i)a clear articulation of the UK’s interests and values, and of their roles in a coherent strategy for the UK’s international policy

ii)clear and limited priorities within designated timeframes

iii)meaningful and targeted resources with which to deliver

iv)greater coherence and alignment among UK levers of influence, and therefore greater impact abroad

v)an unambiguous leadership role for the diplomatic service. The Government has committed to spend 0.7% of GNI on Official Development Assistance (ODA), and we agree with the Government that UK diplomats must play the leading role in coordinating how this money is spent. But we recommend that the resourcing of the UK’s diplomatic service itself be directed by the UK’s strategic needs and must not be skewed by the requirements of ODA eligibility.

---

• A-Z index
• Glossary
• Contact us
• Freedom of Information
• Jobs
• Using this website
• Copyright